I’ve had Reagan all my life. In 1967, 13 years before the rest of you got President Reagan, he became governor of California. It was the terrarium in which Reagan’s tinkerers figured out how to stimulate the beasts in the tract houses to hatred and bathos, the tools with which they ruled and destroyed the nation.

Nixon usually gets the blame for that, but I’ve always found Nixon a rather sympathetic figure: wretched, ugly, and without much malice for either the forests or the ordinary American. Nixon didn’t even share the worship of “business” forced on us all in Reagan’s reign. Nixon’s dreams were old-fashioned Soviet machinations, full of maps and coups; he was willing enough to toss the rest of us a few bones if we’d let him play with his schemes undisturbed. And some of the bones he tossed us were rather significant. It was Nixon who created the EPA and OSHA. Reagan would have strangled both in the cradle.

Reagan did it often enough once he had power, in a thousand blunt, cruel mandates that no one ever mentions. The one I always remember is one of the more trivial: he vetoed the airbag requirement Carter planned to introduce for all 1980 cars sold in the US. Everyone who died in a head-on crash during the next decade can thank Reagan. And you know, they probably would thank him. There is no end to the groveling masochism of this nation where Reagan is concerned. All his victims love him. No wonder the checkers at Safeway wear nose rings; they belong to the world’s biggest submissive website, “Reagan’s Slaves: Real Submissives, Live 24/7.” Before Reagan they would have had decent blue-collar jobs—there really were such things back then—and bought a house of their own. Now they share garage apartments with the scum of the earth and are saving up for a car that runs.

That’s why it always shocks me when I see another manifestation of the consensus view that Nixon was the evil Republican. I just saw a Futurama episode with Nixon’s head in a jar, planning to take over the world. Reagan never gets that treatment; he’s a god.

I suppose it proves what I knew already: he was good at what he did. After all, if he really was the perfect evil spirit for this tribe, why should I be surprised or disgusted that we worship him? Like I once said to this Women’s Studies professor, “Why get upset at all this sexism? It’s your living; it’s like a marine biologist getting furious at all the salt water on the planet.”

The sad thing is, they don’t really have to “measure up.” Reagan transformed this country; that much of what his adorers say is true. His successors only have to hit the same notes to make their zombie army move in the desired manner. Reagan and his stage managers did the difficult part, experimenting relentlessly until they found the notes that worked.

When you say “Reagan,” you’re using a synechdoche of the classic container-for-the-contained sort. Reagan was the face of a little clique who were the essence of California plutocracy. They took shares in him, the way poorer folk do in a racehorse, funded his campaigns, and stayed with him all the way to the presidency. They were remarkable only for their lack of any distinction. Perhaps the most typical was Holmes Tuttle, a car dealer who came from Oklahoma to get rich. He did, but not the way Bill Gates did. Tuttle was so dumb that he turned down a chance to have the first Volkswagen dealership in California because he was sure no American would ever buy a car made by our erstwhile enemies. Like many successful Californians of his generation, he got rich because he was there, on the spot while the population of California exploded, and the average income soared—and because he had the perfect pathology for a rising tide: unreflecting, smug self-confidence. Tuttle made his money in cars, then picked Reagan as his new product and marketed him like a Ford, using Reagan’s front-man status as a selling point: “[Wouldn’t] you rather have a candidate who is backed by very successful capitalists who have created dozens of companies and tens of thousands of jobs, people who know what it takes to attain success within our system?”

Reagan’s other backers were even less distinguished. There was Alfred Bloomingdale, who inherited his money and made the papers in his own right only by buying an underage prostitute, Vicky Morgan, making her his ponygirl, complete with saddle, then dumping her when she was of boring legal age. Bloomingdale died before the palimony suit, but his wife fought to the end not to give the wretched girl a cent. Vicky Morgan was eventually beaten to death with a baseball bat; Bloomingdale was mourned by all of Reagan’s America.

Bedtime for Bloomingdale’s slave: One day she’s making Reagan look bad (above)… The next day, Jesus pinch-hits one for the Gipper (below)

Then there was Charles Wick, Reagan’s communications guy, the man who taught the Great Communicator how to communicate. Reagan made Wick director of the US Information Agency, but before that, he’d made his bones as a “very successful capitalist” by producing one film: Snow White and the Three Stooges.

The most grotesque of Reagan’s owners was Joseph Coors, an outright lunatic whose family money is behind nearly every sleazy fascist initiative in recent US history. Coors was Reagan’s mentor on campus radicalism. Coors even had his own hilarious stint on the Board of Regents of the University of Colorado, doing his best to destroy that institution before he realized that it was better to work through the camera-ready Reagan. He made sure Reagan’s hatred of the public universities never let up, but stepped back to let the group refine its techniques for stirring bile among the sullen majority.

It’s tempting sometimes to think what one grenade, detonated at one of this “kitchen cabinet’s” meetings, could have done to change history. California could have been, was on the verge of becoming, something truly extraordinary. It’s no accident that Philip K. Dick’s Martian colonists in their hovels choose to dream of San Francisco in the mid-1960s, out of all the fantasylands they could visit. All the worst of America seemed to be melting away. The South of evil memory: melting away, not without blood and horror, but melting, doomed. The mean, stupid bullies’ world of jocks and losers to which all American children were violently introduced at an early age–melting away in a warmer and more humorous pantheon of possible identities. The dullards’ worship of Coolidge’s “business,” melting away in contemptuous laughter.

It’s easy to see now that this was a delusion, the absurd dream of a tiny fraction of rich kids and middle-class brains. There was another world out there, a thousand times bigger and ferociously devoted to the old hatreds. I grew up in that other world. Actually, I grew up on the border, literally, between those two Californias that Reagan would soon set at each others’ throats: a place called Pleasant Hill, California, 13 miles east of Berkeley, but across the hills, the other side of Caldecott Tunnel. The hot, tract-home side—Reagan’s side. I could cross over; every summer the summer school took us to the Berkeley Folk Festival to listen vaguely to cleaned-up songs about murdered maidens but mainly to look at those magnificent hippie girls, who were in my little mind a complete refutation of the politics, aesthetics and in fact the entire culture of the Reagan side.

But that was once a year. The rest of the time, we were Reaganites before Reagan. You have to realize that in the mid-sixties, what is now called “the Right” was hopelessly confused about what was going on. There really was a sort of silent majority, because no one could figure out to say what it wanted to say in public. What it wanted to say, what I heard every time we watched the news, was simple: “Kill them!” But before Reagan, no one knew how to say that out loud.

It was the students who gave Reagan’s managers their chance. Nobody remembers now how insanely those students were hated by the people out on the hot, sullen side of the California divide. To understand where that hate came from, you have to pan back a little. Reagan’s “Greatest Generation” (which they certainly were not, but that’s another story) created the G.I. Bill, enfranchising a huge number of veterans who would never have dreamed of doing something like going to college if the state hadn’t waved money in their faces while they were being demobilized. In America, higher education had been something for rich kids—rich boys, in the beginning, slowly expanding to include some rich girls as well. Everyone else was supposed to go to work, and count themselves lucky if they found a job.

The G.I. Bill made college a normal option, for a huge chunk of families who weren’t particularly rich. And soon, like many perks that once marked the aristocracy, it became something desirable, then something almost required of those who were striving. My father’s family was one of those. They grew up, ten kids, in a house about the size of your garage in the slums of Jersey City. The war freed them from that claustrophobic Irish-Catholic ghetto and they strove successfully—most of them, anyway. Our failed outpost in the California suburbs was the exception. It wasn’t easy for educated white people to fail completely in California in the post-war years, but we managed it. And still we gave our allegiance to Reagan’s counterrevolution, his long war to destroy the government initiatives that had given all our successful uncles their chance. In fact, our poverty contributed to the virulence of our resentment of those students, those lucky swarms of Berkeley kids who mouthed off and didn’t have to work.

Their world was at once too tempting and too sinful for us, but to most of the other families on our street, it was simply alien, offensive for suggesting that there could or should be a gentler, more literate world. I had a foot in both worlds, and my parents, though fiercely reactionary, were gentle with their children, devoted to our education. So we ended up going to those colleges. But no one else from that neighborhood did. The only way you’ll ever understand how Reagan came to rule is if you actually remember his people. These are some who lived on my street:

My friend Kenny Tamblyn, three houses down: his dad was a welder at the refinery, used to beat Kenny with a belt when he came home in a bad mood. Mr. Tamblyn was pure white and wanted you to know it, too—he was from Oklahoma—but he had these slitty eyes, looked like a cross between a Mongol and an Orc. Liked to shoot things.

The Hansens, up the street with the pickup. Also worked at the refinery, but Mr. Tamblyn didn’t deign to know him; some guild snobbery I never understood. Mr. Hansen was loud and fat and stupid even by local standards. A few years on, he had Wallace signs all over his tiny lawn, but in the mid-60s he settled for threatening to shoot our dog when we walked it past his place. Two sons, roughly my age, sullen, silent, special ed. His wife was rarely allowed out of the house. She was tiny, less than five feet, and I think retarded, with a severe speech impediment. When she escaped and wandered down Belle Avenue, she’d babble about Jesus. (That’s another big, big change since Reagan’s time: it was eccentric, embarrassing, to talk about God in California before Reagan took over.)

The Mastranos at the corner had one son. He was killed in their garage by a DEA agent. Supposedly he was going for a gun. He didn’t own any guns. No one objected; it was clear to everyone that somehow or other he had it coming. His mother went insane.

My brother’s friend Brian, one of the smartest and most delightful little kids I knew. He and my brother met at one of those gifted summer schools. We used to make “civilizations” out of mud and scraps by the creek. But Brian’s dad, who worked at the gas station, would come home pissed off and scream down to the creek, telling Brian to get his butt in there. Once Brian was inside…yeah, you guessed it. With a belt. We tried to walk away fast so we wouldn’t hear Brian screaming.

Brian, IQ or no IQ, was not going to UC Berkeley or anyplace else. None of those kids were going to Berkeley. None of their parents wanted them to. Some of those parents were sick monsters like Brian’s dad, or my friend Calvin’s dad, who once interrupted Calvin’s sleepover birthday party to chase Calvin around the yard with the inevitable belt. Most of the others were just standard human issue: mean, dumb, resentful. They didn’t want the fanciful pre-Raphaelite hippie enclave of Berkeley to exist. That it should not merely exist but talk back to their appointed masters, the real-estate developers and car dealers who were the anointed of California, provoked these people to insane rage.

They weren’t poor. You have to remember that. Reagan would see to it that their kids were poor, but their generation was coasting happily on the well-paid, for-life blue-collar jobs that were plentiful back then. Most of them had far more money than we did, as well as virtually free medical care through “Kaiser.” They were willing to give all that up in the name of what was nearest their hearts: a world in which all public discourse was bland and epideictic, and privilege was restricted to those who were restrained enough to keep it secret. It was the cracking open of American discourse, with the “Free Speech” profanity, people talking about sex, and parading their pleasures on the streets of San Francisco, that made them murderously angry. That rage was even stronger than their hatred of black people. Although Reagan used coded and not-so-coded race triggers in his speeches (“welfare bums” was a favorite of his, as was “militants”), it was the hatred of those students, who were overwhelmingly white and middle-class, that made the people of the inland tracts love him.

And it was that gloating, taunting exhibition of pleasures properly reserved for the back rooms of the elite that drove the inlanders craziest. That was the one thing that made my parents, gentle and erudite people in many ways, make common cause with their neighbors, whom they were in the habit of dismissing as noising, self-indulgent Protestants in most contexts. I’ll always remember my mother’s first day in a writing class at Diablo Valley College, the local community college. She came home in a daze and said, “This woman in my class…one of these hippie women..read her ‘poem’ [you could hear the quotes around the word as she spoke]…and do you know how this ‘poem’ began?”

My brothers and I grunted cautiously. We weren’t sure whose side we were on in this one. In fact, I didn’t come down on the inland side until the local hippie girls made it clear I was not a potential consort.

My mother said, “This is her ‘poem’:

‘My husband’s ass

Is the most beautiful ass

In the world.’”

Silence reigned in our family room. That word “ass,” spoken—twice!—for the first time inside our house, made us all a little dizzy. You could hear the linebreaks, too, and budding poet that I was, I thought, “Maybe she should’ve put the second ‘ass’ on a line by itself.” Then, in one of the sudden switch-flips you do at 12, I imagined, very vividly, tearing out the tongue of the woman who had recited that poem in front of my mother. My brothers were already running from the room, making “la la la” noises so they wouldn’t have to hear whatever else my mother had experienced in class.

I suppose we were a rather high-strung family. Catholics were, in those days. The only people who remind me of them now are the Muslims.

What cemented my allegiance once and for all to that doomed, absurd code was the fact that somehow in the cornucopia of 1960s California, we were completely bankrupt, utter failures.

Disloyalty was not an option as it was for rich kids. If your parents have made it, you can sneer; when the family narrative is an endless replay of disastrous failure, defecting to the comfy and victorious is unthinkable. My parents voted for Reagan, largely on the strength of that poem and a few news shots of Berkeley women dancing to rock with their tops off. I’m sure everyone on Belle Avenue voted the same way, mostly because Wallace wasn’t running in California yet.

But in their case it made sense. Most of them were brutal and illiterate. We weren’t. We were the kind of family who most needed the public sector Reagan set about destroying: penniless, hyperliterate and ambitious. My brothers and I spent most of our free time at the wonderful library near our house. Last time I checked it was open for about 15 hours a week. We gloried in the art and music classes that were soon to be dropped by the public schools. We loved the forests, the one point we grudgingly shared with the VW Bus crowd that voted liberal. And when I applied for college and was turned down by the expensive private schools, Berkeley, center of Belle Avenue’s hatred, accepted me, gave me a chance for a decent education.

It was the public universities like Berkeley that were Reagan’s special target. He didn’t have any interest in starving Stanford, even if he’d had the power; Stanford was for the rich, and only very belatedly joined the student revolt. It was the public universities, above all the Berkeley campus, that he and his public hated. One of Reagan’s famous lines from the time makes clear the basis of that hate: “Education is a privilege, not a right.” Education, at university level, had always been a “privilege” in the United States. In fact, it was the mark of privilege, a sign of belonging to the upper class. After WW II, that changed, and at least in public universities in a few states like California, there really was something like admission on merit. There was no tuition at public universities—imagine, you could get a degree from UC Berkeley without paying a dollar in tuition, if you were good enough. UC official history page evokes that time with something like disbelief in its timeline: “1960 – The California Master Plan for Higher Education affirmed that UC should remain tuitionfree (a widely held view at the time)…”

Yes, “a widely held view at the time,” but that was going to change, thanks to people like our neighbors on Belle Avenue. They hated the notion that kids no better than their own (or so they believed) were daring to ape the rich by getting respected university degrees—and worse still, they lacked the patronizing discretion of the truly privileged who’d preceded them. The people on my street never resented the really rich. What they hated was middle-class people having pleasure, having sex without punishment, ease without the grasshopper’s winter comeuppance.

Reagan plugged that hate into his owners’ agent and, with an assist from Prop 13, managed to destroy everything that was best about the state: the park system, the libraries, the protected shorelines, forests and rivers. He was just in time; when he took power, coastal California was reaching critical mass. There was a moment, as Hunter Thompson says in Fear and Loathing, when it seemed that whole littoral would just lift up, a reversal of the earthquake the inlanders were praying to sink it, and float away from the dead mass of the continent. Reagan came to fix that.

His method was simple: Reagan was the first to talk straight-out hate. Strange as it seems now, nobody was talking hate then, in public. In the living rooms, over dinner, oh yeah! Every house on our street. But not on the air, not yet. Reagan showed the way. This was Reagan 1.0, the California-only issue. This version had not yet learned his second great innovation: the smile. This early Reagan was angry, as Mark Ames discovered in a search of archived stories from the 1960s. The headlines of those stories would shock fans of the later “amiable” Reagan: “Angry Reagan Shouts Back at Heckling Students”; “Reagan Prepared to Attack Militant Student Leaders”; “Reagan Explains Angry Words.”

Rage at the students not only got Reagan elected, it powered his entire career. He took that show on the road in 1969, delivering a major speech reviling insolent student protestors in DC just before the Vietnam Moratorium demonstrations. As a reporter noted at the time, this was Reagan’s chance to impress the national Republican cadre, which was finally experiencing the sort of student infestation Reagan had been battling for years: “It is an opportunity for [Reagan] to test in a national forum whether his militant stand on California’s campuses…has support among the great middle class nationwide as well as in his own state.”

Of course that’s reporter-speak. They knew by then it would work. If hatred could work in California in the sixties, did anybody really doubt it would work in Missouri? Winning the governorship of California was the hard part, as Nixon found in 1962. From there to the presidency was all downhill for a hate man. All you have to do is start your campaign in Mississippi, as Reagan did in 1979—because in a countrywide election, “blacks” played better than “students.”

There’s another, far stranger, California political story that proves decisively how far you could get by smacking down students: the strange career of S. I. Hayakawa. Until 1968 Hayakawa was an academic wacko, one of those bypassed relics whose office at the end of the corridor is avoided by all. He had pursued a number of bizarre crusades, including one against replacing alphabet prefixes on phone numbers with digits, and by the mid-sixties was marking time, waiting for retirement at the undistinguished CSU-San Francisco. Then his history of rightwing nuttiness lifted him to fame: in 1968 Reagan appointed him president of the university, and a few months later Hayakawa was on the front page of every newspaper in the country, pulling the speaker wires off a student loudspeaker van during a demonstration.

Ten years later Hayakawa was a US senator from California, solely on the strength of that one photo. Belle Avenue had long memories, at least for hate.

Ronald Reagan rose to power much faster. He was sworn in as governor at a few minutes to midnight on January 3, 1967. He was such a hick nutcase that when his astrologer told him that would be the most auspicious moment, Reagan insisted on it, placating the sucker reporters with the usual garbage about wanting to get to work undoing his democrat predecessor’s big-gov’t boondoggles. They all bought it. I never heard a word about Reagan and “his wizened co-star” Nancy’s astrological and UFO creepiness until the late 80s, and no one cared even then.

By that time, Reagan 2.0 had been in power for some time, relying on a lesson learned the hard way during his governorship: use the hate to get in power, but if you want to stay there, you need that Colgate smile they coached you on in Hollywood. This was the smiling Reagan that amnesiac America chooses to recall, the nice grandpa nobody ever had.

But that’s not the Reagan who vivisected my home state. It was his snarl they loved in those days. And even after he learned to smile, the snarl was there, a Cheshire snarl that stayed when the smile faded. Reagan was by that time defined more by a wink than a smile. The wink said to his vast, vile constituency that the smile was simply the best face to wear while the malign enterprise proceeded apace. Like Limbaugh’s little jokes about himself as “a harmless puffball,” Reagan’s smile was meant to be seen through. It was useful for the undecided suckers, because it distinguished him from the other Phalangist contenders, who could not, no matter how long they were coached, stop looking like they were smiling over some hideous memory.

It was a wonderful smile. It suited America right down to the ground: part gloat, part taunt, part utter void. By the time Reagan went to DC, he no longer had to do the grunt work of stoking all that hate. His techniques worked so incredibly well that a whole army of little hate commissars was on the air, all day, every day, keeping Belle Avenue pissed off and stupid. And over all of them presided that terrible smile, at once a taunt, a gloat, and a claim of complete innocence, or at least amnesia.

78 Comments

The best take down of America’s most despicable villian ever.
Thank you Dolan, this is one of your best pieces ever.

2.
Brick | February 5th, 2011 at 11:42 pm

What’s there to say? Excellent article.

3.
Well done | February 6th, 2011 at 1:10 am

Fantastic Dolan. Hopefully they are bbq-ing that sob in hell right now.

Egypt 2011 = Mexico 1910. Put the war nerd on it. Mubarak is Diaz and history is repeating itself. It will be just as drawn out now as it was then.

4.
John Figler | February 6th, 2011 at 1:59 am

I see that the envy-hate-lack of sex as the real engine behind American politics line is going to be something of this spring’s leitmotiv… but I like it!

5.
Reggie | February 6th, 2011 at 2:32 am

The interment of the middle class didn’t have that much to do with cutting social spending of which they had been recipient. It had more to do with free trade and mass immigration of low-skilled workers. The latter definitely started under Reagan’s presidency; I don’t know about the former.

If you want to make money, you need not go to Stanford. You can go to a more affordable state school. According to research using pretty strong epistemology, it doesn’t make much difference – unless you’re wanting to make $10 billion a year at some bullshit consultancy or hedge fund. Or be an academic. Otherwise it’s kind of a scam to pick the expensive school… unless it has some value to you other than future earnings.

The resentment of hippies thing rings true.

Regarding the above mentioned ‘free’ trade, let me elaborate. Only we practice it. Our trading partners don’t. So, it means that we (the US) get screwed – except for our rich capitalists, who benefit. And no, the benefit does not ‘trickle down’ very much – another Reagan theme.

That said, another part of the evisceration of the Mittelstand is simply technological advances in manufacturing etc, making production much more labor-efficient. Still, it doesn’t help for the middle class to, at the same time, become exposed to competition from hyper-competent Chinese factories with workers that are stoked about a $2,500 salary – or to a lesser extent from Mexican and Vietnamese workers.

An interesting look back. Reagan was before my time (I was born in the late 80s), but the story I always hear about him was when he and my Prime Minister at the time, Brian Mulroney sang on stage together.

If experience has taught me anything, it’s that musical politicians are the worst.

I am an American man, and I have decided to boycott American women. In a nutshell, American women are the most likely to cheat on you, to divorce you, to get fat, to steal half of your money in the divorce courts, don’t know how to cook or clean, don’t want to have children, etc. Therefore, what intelligent man would want to get involved with American women?

American women are generally immature, selfish, extremely arrogant and self-centered, mentally unstable, irresponsible, and highly unchaste. The behavior of most American women is utterly disgusting, to say the least.

This blog is my attempt to explain why I feel American women are inferior to foreign women (non-American women), and why American men should boycott American women, and date/marry only foreign (non-American) women.

BOYCOTT AMERICAN WOMEN!

9.
Homer Erotic | February 6th, 2011 at 8:23 am

Brilliant if nauseatingly cynical, as usual, Mr. Dolan.

For those readers too lazy to go to Dictionary.com, “epideictic” is an adjective referring to speech or writing meant mostly to display supposed rhetorical skill.

10.
DocAmazing | February 6th, 2011 at 9:35 am

I’ve got relatives in Pleasant Hill, and Jesus Christ have you painted their portraits.

This article is pure genius. At the risk of sounding myopic, I agree entirely with it because I’ve seen the same sort of dynamics elsewhere.

While reading the article, all undesired, Hank Williams’ song “A Country Boy Can Survive” started playing in my head. The song is basically the 80’s version of Mel Haggard’s ode to being white trash.

I am from the rural South, where we pride ourselves on our “common sense” as opposed to those city folks who might have “book sense.” You see, we have it all figured out. Statistics, schmatistics… We want to die earlier, be less healthy, divorce more often and have more babies out of wedlock. Nothing is as good now as the good old days, and by good old days I don’t mean post-WW2, I mean 1930’s and before. The tape-worm ridden, working all day long in the fields for nothing, good old days.

When there was talk of the system collapsing around 2008, some of my relatives said, smugly I might add, “those suburban people with their vacations will suffer, but we’ll be alright.” Alright that is, until the Walmart closes and they stop handing out high-interest visas.

I think it does no good trying to help these people. They’ll resent it, and, moreover, they’ll forget who did them a favor. I think most of ’em believe that safety regulations and paid holidays magically appeared, and when they say “my medicare” they mean it.

13.
Ozinator | February 6th, 2011 at 10:59 am

VERY good piece

14.
boson | February 6th, 2011 at 11:08 am

may he rot in hell.

beautiful takedown Dr Nolan.

15.
Sepecat | February 6th, 2011 at 11:18 am

Great write up, because it hits all the notes. I thought voting against your own interests was a recent development ’till now. That Obama claims Reagan as an inspiration explains some things.

List me as another person extolling this screed’s unparalleled brilliance.

17.
Homer Erotic | February 6th, 2011 at 11:55 am

@Rambo: It is my evaluation that the quintessential traits of all modern Americans, not just women, are being dumb as holy fuck for the sake of being as dumb as holy fuck and having absolutely zero ability to morally look in the mirror. I believe you are focussing on women the way you are is because of your own personal suffering. Wake up and smell the damn coffee! You’re not the only one who’s hurting and suffering these days, friend.

18.
wintersoldier | February 6th, 2011 at 12:28 pm

There are two fronts competing to define
the Reagan legacy and they’re an oil and
water tsunami headed down their paths of least resistance. So often the Power gets to
write the history in the near term, how else could a library bear Reagans name, and it looks as if its here for the duration.
There are still pockets of belief that Leopold II was justified in his motivations given “the era” unfortunately the era of Reagans is keeping his brain stored under a desk somewhere in a vat of bile. Just Americas faster, shinier Mobutu.

19.
LIExpressway | February 6th, 2011 at 1:12 pm

Terror Management Theory

20.
MQ | February 6th, 2011 at 2:02 pm

Fantastic.

21.
Ilona | February 6th, 2011 at 2:02 pm

Greatest President ever, anywhere!

One has to admire the stern determination to shoot up all the taxpayers’ money up into the space. Great visionary.

Philip K. Dick would have turned green with envy, if he had lived though the Reagan years.

22.
H. Khariq | February 6th, 2011 at 2:15 pm

“My brothers were already running from the room, making “la la la” noises so they wouldn’t have to hear whatever else my mother had experienced in class.”

Is this real?

23.
Jamie | February 6th, 2011 at 2:37 pm

Replace Reagan’s name with Thatcher during the article, and the article still manages to retain most of its accuracy. The most tragic event of the 80s was the IRA’s failure to kill the bitch.

24.
Mudhead | February 6th, 2011 at 3:28 pm

California in the 60s and 70s was an amazing place, that was destroyed by the colossal stupidity of its citizenry, as Dolan relates. I grew up in Southern California in at the same time as Dolan, the very hotbed of reaction. You should have heard the military pensioners and aerospace workers rage about “socialism”. Self-knowledge is not a common trait among Americans of, any state. One minor correction: Prop 13, a despicable piece of legislation enacted by very people it was intended to harm, came into existence in 1978, four years after the Gipper had left the governor’s mansion, under Jerry Brown’s watch, in fact. Of course, the Reagan era in California paved the way for this act of self-immolation

25.
g6hh87j | February 6th, 2011 at 4:20 pm

“Reagan never gets that [Nixon] treatment; he’s a god.” – Like Dude, you think the Christmas bombing, not to mention the secret war in Cambodia, might have something to do with the negative karma Nixon gets. In general I find excusing LBJ and Nixon’s war crimes by pointing to some domestic policy that seemed pleasant repulsive.

“The G.I. Bill made college a normal option, for a huge chunk of families who weren’t particularly rich.”

Today’s student loan serfs can thank the GI bill for raising the cost of education, while lowing its quality resulting in armies of incapable college grads waitressing (or worse) to pay their student loan bills(really tax) to their social betters, or these days any government retiree. In short the G.I. Bill made college a normal option, for a huge chunk of families who’s not particularly talented children lost a half decade or more of prime work years and will spend the rest of their lives paying their college loans off, while their comparative English lit. professor retires to a village in France to complain endlessly about the retards he-she was force to deal with for those 25 years.

In particular you will note that Reagan raised taxes, especially social security. In many cases on the same dummies that took out the student loans, a kind of cruel double whammy.

26.
RedBastardGod | February 6th, 2011 at 5:18 pm

Reagan was, hands down, the worst president in American history until W was handed the job. There is not one Republican in America who is not a total fuck up and to our demise, the Democrats are almost just as bad at fucking things up. What makes Republicans stand out is that they are proud of being stupid, ugly and the worst humans beings on the planet.

17 Feb 1987 Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev reveals Reagan’s preoccupation with space aliens: “At our meeting in Geneva, the U.S. President said that if the earth faced an invasion by extraterrestials, the United States and the Soviet Union would join forces to repel such an invasion. I shall not dispute the hypothesis, though I think it’s early yet to worry about such an intrusion…”

15 Sep 1987 During a luncheon with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnatze in the White House, President Reagan once again wondered what would happen if the Earth were under attack from an external threat: “Don’t you think the United States and the Soviet Union would be together?”

4 May 1988 During a question-and-answer session in Chicago, President Reagan revisits his ‘invaders from space’ notion: “I’ve often wondered, what if all of us in the world discovered that we were threatened by an outer — a power from outer space, from another planet. Wouldn’t we all of a sudden find that we didn’t have any differences between us at all, we were all human beings, citizens of the world, and wouldn’t we come together to fight that particular threat?”

28.
wengler | February 6th, 2011 at 5:39 pm

This should be required reading for future generations.

Reagan is an excellent example of the old time Calvinist tradition reasserting itself. It is a hatred of human happiness combined with the self-belief of being one of the elect.

29.
lylelylelyle | February 6th, 2011 at 6:28 pm

nice.

30.
I1 | February 6th, 2011 at 6:37 pm

What did Penn say? Blaming Reagan is like blaming the dog hood ornament on a Mack Truck as it rolls off the cliff. B grade actor ends up as King phony baloney. Perfect. Put him on Rushmore, next to Ollie North.

31.
frank | February 6th, 2011 at 6:52 pm

Reagan was a weird dude…

From an intervie with Harold Bloom:

Not long ago President Reagan, who should be remembered only for his jokes because his jokes I think are really very good, was asked how it was he could have managed eight years as president and still look so wonderful. Did you see this?

INTERVIEWER

No.

BLOOM

It was in the Times. He said, “Let me tell you the story about the old psychiatrist being admired by a young psychiatrist who asks, ‘How come you still look so fresh, so free of anxiety, so little worn by care, when you’ve spent your entire life sitting as I do every day, getting worn out listening to the miseries of your patients?’ To which the older psychiatrist replies, ‘It’s very simple, young man. I never listen.’ ” Such sublime, wonderful, and sincere self-revelation on the part of Reagan! In spite of all one’s horror at what he has done or failed to do as President, it takes one’s breath away with admiration.

32.
wintersoldier | February 6th, 2011 at 7:49 pm

The story of Reagans ascendency is like Damiens in how General Electric grooms him for dominance and all the rest. If there ever was an anti Christ Reagan came closest to its prophecy. Face it, just like republicans, natural enemies of the middle class and the oligarchs shills. How else could such a parade of loons like Bachman, Palin and every one of them possibly have risen to anywhere close to where they have w/o the assist of Kochs and Armies and the mutants they’ve created.

33.
Fissle | February 6th, 2011 at 9:05 pm

It wasn’t Reagan who started outsourcing US jobs to Asia. Outsourcing jobs to Asia started with Japan in the 1950’s, as a matter of political expediency, with US television set manufacturing being the first to go.

At the conclusion of WWII the Soviets, unlike the puritan pukes in Washington, were not concerned so much with petty revenge fantasies like de-nazification. The Soviets were pissed because they did the bulk of WWII heaving lifting and got the least valuable spoils. The Reds, being the practical people that they were, wanted their share of the loot and immediately began revolutionary agitation in America’s newly acquired vassal states.

Taking advantage of America’s unpopular dominatrix complex, the Soviets were successful at first. Red cadres in Japan were making good progress to the horror of American occupation authorities. The US did a 180 and decided that the best way to prevent Japan from going Red was to integrate Japan’s economy with the “West” through peaceful, civilian business activities.

The Japanese people needed jobs, and some American industries would be transferred to Japan to create those jobs, the TV set manufacturing industry was the first of those industries. It was a strategic sacrifice. Yes, American workers would lose those TV jobs, but the rest of the US economy was big enough to absorb the displaced workers, and it was cheaper than fighting a war with the Soviets. It worked too. Japan was transformed from a warrior society to a society of docile manga fags in short order.

Fast forward to the 1969 Sino-Soviet border wars. The Chinese took a pounding at the hands of the Russians and Nixon/Kissinger took a page right out of Eisenhower’s playbook and engaged the Chinese as an economic counterweight to the Soviets. America began transferring manufacturing know-how to the Chinese for the same reason it did with Japan more than a decade early…it was cheaper to sacrifice American workers and industries producing consumer products (defense industries were not outsourced) than it was to engage in a outright slugfest with a nuclear armed Soviet Union.

American business owners went along with the above scheme because it meant huge profits for them…fire all your unionized American workers, liquidate your plant and equipment, and import the same products from low wage countries at a huge saving in cost of goods but retail them at the same price as goods that had been previously made in the USA. The profits for business owners were astonishing. People like Nixon and Kissinger, however, were practical enough not to let this kind of thing get too out of hand, since the longer term implications for the US economy were not good.

And then, along came Reagan. When it came to servicing businessmen, Reagan had even less shame than a five dollar crack whore. It was under Reagan that outsourcing was driven by nothing more than a desire for profits. Profits so obscene they were beyond the dreams of 19th century robber barons. The results can no longer be denied by anyone short of the Limbaugh-type Kool-Aid drinkers. America has been transformed into country of haves and have nots, the middle class wiped out. The funniest part, is that Reagan managed to convince the middle class to cheerfully stick its head in the noose.

34.
Plamen Petkov | February 6th, 2011 at 10:11 pm

J.G. Ballard nailed Reagan 100% with his “Why I want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” written way back in 1968.

from the wiki:

It is written in the style of a scientific paper and catalogues an apocryphal series of bizarre experiments intended to measure the psychosexual appeal of Ronald Reagan, who was then the Governor of California and candidate for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination.

Ballard himself was inspired by the then-new phenomenon of “media politicians” and in his preface to the 1990 edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, explained:

In his commercials Reagan used the smooth, teleprompter-perfect tones of the TV auto-salesman to project a political message that was absolutely the reverse of bland and reassuring. A complete discontinuity existed between Reagan’s manner and body language, on the one hand, and his scarily simplistic far-right message on the other. Above all, it struck me that Reagan was the first politician to exploit the fact that his TV audience would not be listening too closely, if at all, to what he was saying, and indeed might well assume from his manner and presentation that he was saying the exact opposite of the words actually emerging from his mouth.[2]

In 1970, the pamphlet was added as an appendix to The Atrocity Exhibition, leading Doubleday to pulp its first American edition of that work.[2]

At the 1980 Republican Convention in Detroit a copy of Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan, furnished with the seal of the Republican Party, was distributed by ex-Situationists to the RNC delegates. According to Ballard, it was accepted for what it resembled: a psychological position paper on the candidate’s subliminal appeal, commissioned by a think-tank.

# “Slow-motion film of Reagan’s speeches produced a marked erotic effect in an audience of spastic children”[3]
# “Faces were seen as either circumcised (JFK, Khrushchev) or uncircumcised (LBJ, Adenauer). In assembly-kit tests Reagan’s face was uniformly perceived as a penile erection. Patients were encouraged to devise the optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan.”

I’m amazed nobody has mentioned this fact yet. And you guys are usually pretty good.

35.
Jay Billington Bulworth | February 6th, 2011 at 10:16 pm

Thanks, John, for pulling the darkness out into the light. However repulsive Reaganite California sounds, it doesn’t hold a candle to the political responses to fascism proposed by privileged Boomer leftists and liberals, who did as much to maintain the social and political divide as Reagan himself.

Angry, vicious, ignorant, and belligerent people generally don’t change when you ask nicely.* Instead of a smart counterattack with those same whuppin’ belts (civic or literal) as a warning to the rest, it’s “So, like, let’s have a march, dude! I’ve got a petition we can sign.”

* nor do the disconnected, comfortably rich, either, but that’s another rant.

36.
my talkative ringpiece | February 6th, 2011 at 11:04 pm

Brilliant. I’m not plugged in to most media, and I’ve still been hearing over AM radio for the last few days what wonderful people we Americans are for having produced this wonderful man, the hero-God, Reagan. Puke.

Hi, I’m part of the libertard cult, so I’m going to recommend you read something from my cult. It’s all so true. Rothbard, he predicted everything. He’s like Nostradamus, only more Nostradamus-y. Plus, he was close to the Kochs until he got in a fight with the Kochs, and hoo-wee did they have a fight. Sort of like how cults always have these fights you know. Anyway, here’s the nutty cult piece I wanted to show you:

“I grew up in Southern California in at the same time as Dolan, the very hotbed of reaction. You should have heard the military pensioners and aerospace workers rage about “socialism”. ”

You describe a very common phenomenon. My elderly neighbor is ex-military and retired our of the defense industry. He worked for the post office during his college years (college paid for by the GI Bill). In other words, he never had a true private sector job in his life. You should hear him go off about socialism and welfare bums.

39.
Yam Digger | February 7th, 2011 at 8:14 am

In the end, I think it’s poetic justice that Reagon came down with Alseimers and spent his last years pissing and shitting up his own pants while Nancy looked on sadly

40.
Don | February 7th, 2011 at 8:27 am

@33 Fissle: Brilliant post; as enjoyable as Dolan and arguably more informative.

Remember, folks: just because President Reagan looked after the interests of the powerless in our society does not mean that he necessarily let down the Chamber of Commerce or the American Bankers Association.

Can you really boycott a business that’s already declined your patronage? It’s kind of like striking while on unemployment. The sexual/sociological rendition of “I meant to do that.”

I see an anthropomorphic slab of silicone in your future, and finally a woman who’d jump into an ocean of scabies to escape her home country.

Better hurry; when US citizenship becomes a lateral move, fellas like you will be outta luck.

47.
CAW | February 7th, 2011 at 3:13 pm

@4. John Figler

John Figler wrote:

“I see that the envy-hate-lack of sex as the real engine behind American politics line is going to be something of this spring’s leitmotiv… but I like it!”

In a book-length psychoanalytical work on Reagan, which is if nothing else really entertaining science fiction, the author points his finger at Ronnie’s neurotic habit of associating communism with orgies, and thus Berkeley with the USSR.

In the book, it is written:

“For Reagan not only saw communists as parricides, but also as extremely active sexually-completely in contrast to the actual sexual code in most communist countries. For instance, when he ran for Governor of California, one of the central themes of his campaign was “the mess at Berkeley,” a place where, he said, they held “sexual orgies so vile I can-not describe them to you,” promising if elected to “investigate the charges of communism and blatant sexual misbehavior on the Berkeley campus.”(33)”

And now, for the “spite vote” tie-in:

“A good part of the reason why he was elected was that, as one biographer put it, “hidden away in the hearts of parents was the fear that their own children might one day go away to college, grow beards and march against authority.”(34)”

On the other hand, he did grab Gorby by the balls and tell him that he would cheerfully nuke the shit out of him and every other goddam commie. And he meant it.

So he had his good side too.

49.
Joe | February 7th, 2011 at 4:39 pm

Brilliant piece Dolan and Nixon made some spot on observations of Reagan’s strangeness and oddball behavior while he visited the White House as Governor of California in the early 1970s.

50.
Allen | February 7th, 2011 at 5:34 pm

Really excellent polemic … I’m not sure how much of this draws on Pleasant Hell, but anyway why not expand this into a book?

(…lengthy take down of Reagan/explanation of the political culture that spawned him emphasizing the de-romanticizing of the “American people” angle/ personal narrative.)

I’d buy it.

51.
icecycle | February 7th, 2011 at 6:14 pm

Definitely the Reagan that I remember.
The one who made Nixon look good.
The one who brought the Bush family on board.
This one is a Quisling to the American people.
Burn a joint in hell, Ron.

52.
rick | February 7th, 2011 at 8:41 pm

This is good stuff, embodying the spirit of breaking all the imbecile journalistic rules–if you don’t suck, which is like the Death Star run from Star Wars, statistically. “use the force! Unless you suck! Which is overwhelmingly statistically likely!” Mark Ames started it here, and I wish he’d break some rules, but then I wish we all were millionaires, too–but I’ve read this publication for 8 years–there’s nothing–ever–I’ve read for 8 years.

53.
my talkative ringpiece | February 7th, 2011 at 10:44 pm

Fissile, keep it coming please – along with Dolan, Ames, Levine, and “Brecher” of course!

You’ve made me think: I don’t think my uncle, the NASA one, has ever earned a private-sector dollar in his entire life, either. Gov’t all the way, college etc etc all on our dime, from the last day of high school on. Extremely self-righteous S.O.B., probably thinks Reagan walked on water.

I got gov’t backed student loans in college but … I PAID THEM BACK. I could never do shit right, if I were a good Reagan Republican I’d have milked the system for every penny I could, wiggled out of the student loans somehow, etc.

54.
Derp | February 7th, 2011 at 11:05 pm

Derp derp! It’s funny when people who don’t like Reagan get screwed over by his economic policies, harharhar, derp derp derp!

And Reagan had to give weapons to the Iranians so they could kill the Iraqis, derp derp derp! If it wasn’t for him then the Iraq invasion would have been a lot more difficult!

55.
Shona ( NZ) | February 8th, 2011 at 12:17 am

Superb. a vivid and accurate picture of the begining of the moral and financial bankrupting of the USA.

56.
Todd Starr | February 8th, 2011 at 2:28 am

I lived through the Reagan era but I’d mysteriously managed to blank it all out… I guess I should say thanks for reminding me. Or maybe not!

But seriously, you guys, a terrific article on a mythical monster who every blue-collar self-loathing Republican now worships – surely the greatest feat of black propaganda in the history of these United States!

57.
Flatulissimo | February 8th, 2011 at 6:39 am

I’ll add my voice encouraging Dolan to make this into a book. Maybe co-write with Ames. That would be brilliant.

This is the best piece of writing on the whole goddamn internet right now.

58.
bko | February 8th, 2011 at 12:14 pm

@51: ditchweed seasoned with paraquat.
This was sooo refreshing! Give yourself a pat on the back, Mr. Dolan.
Funny thing– when rr died, his reviewal was remarkably underattended, considering how beloved he was supposed to have been.

“The 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth has seen a mixture of marksmanship, ranging from accurate to deranged, the latter as befits a dangerously deluded man who brought the world so near to a nuclear holocaust.”

I first watched this without the title, and until I saw the American flag I swore this was a clip of some North Korean parade.

61.
SweetLeftFoot | February 9th, 2011 at 5:19 am

I work as political journalist and this is the best piece of political journalism I have seen in a long, long time. Keep it coming Dolan you magnificent bastard you.

62.
Karen | February 9th, 2011 at 6:00 am

That was the best piece I have read in a long time. It didn’t hurt that my nostalgia kicked in with a potent force reading about all the “raygun” meanness. My kid brother printed buttons and fake money to pass out with anti-raygun movie quotes;like: “Where’s My Head?” After waking up in the movie scene when his legs are gone. I have forgotten the movie but I still have the button. My kid brother was contacted by the FBI for printing fake monopoly money can you believe it? How can you forget a monster who was elected on your B’day? I cried for days. I did not vote for him. Another monster was elected on my B’day and I am so very sorry that I voted for him. It is weird that they were both sworn into office on election night

You’re falling for the old “we all loved Reagan” meme that the corporate media has been playing for 30 years.

We DIDN’T all love Reagan. Some of us hated him then and hate him now.

Like you.

And all white people were not doing well in California, as you point out, while still believing, apparently, that white people elsewhere were doing better.

Just because most very rich people are white, doesn’t make all white people rich.

I also grew up in California, but down in the San Gabriel valley, where we choked on smog daily.

The people of California, in my opinion, had to be taught to hate.

The wealthy have spent billions of dollars to make us the hateful, nasty people that we are today.

I blame them.

64.
Allen Davis | February 9th, 2011 at 5:47 pm

It was also Nixon who passed the Equal Opportunity Acts regarding employment, and housing. Nixon passed more civil rights legislation than any president in history, past or present. Admit it, Dolan. You’re irrational hatred for anything resembling “the man,” trumps your ability to be entirely honest in your political rants.
If we can agree that glaring omission of facts to support an unsupportable claim is equal to telling a bald-faced lie at worst, and ignorance at best, it’s no wonder your essays should always be read with suspicion, rather than with the good-will of the reader.
Work on that, Mr. Dolan.

65.
Filler | February 12th, 2011 at 11:18 pm

@64:

What the fuck are you babbling about? What does Nixon’s record on civil rights have to do with this piece? Did you miss the paragraph where Dolan praised Nixon?

When I read about things such as the purported suicide note to which I have linked in my screen-handle, I can’t help but think that even the Wahabbist Islamic new caliphate we’re all supposed to dread would in some ways probably be a more compassionate society than the one that the Gipper’s legacy brought into being. (Though obviously, it would be rather less compassionate in the harsh bedouin patriarchal morality it would brutally enforce.)

67.
gt | February 15th, 2011 at 5:09 pm

Attributions for those news clips would be nice. They’re really fascinating snapshots of the time, and it would be great to be able to track them down and read the whole thing.

68.
Wyse Guy | February 16th, 2011 at 6:59 am

#25, g6hh87j, Ames responds to your point about student loans in the context of Reaganite California.

He mentions how the improvement to the GI Bill in California, in the form of the University of California system, and free tuition, made the system better.In contrast Reagan in his own state, ruined that and created the student loan problem for UC students by instituting tuition. You may say that the GI Bill created the student loan problem across the country, but I must add that in pre-Reaganite California they had already circumvented that problem. Reagan, and his philosophy, and some of the people pushing him forward were the problem.

69.
Destro | February 16th, 2011 at 1:49 pm

David Frum admits that since Reagan real incomes have declined for most Americans and he calls for income re-distribution. He says so in answering a reader on his latest blog:

Incomes policies per se don’t really work. They’ve been tried extensively in Europe in the sixties and seventies and always failed. What you’re really getting at I think and it’s an entirely valid point is the decline in real purchasing power of 80-90% of the country which has been going on apart from a brief interruption in the 90’s for thirty years. At bottom this is why all these market based solutions the Republicans keep advancing won’t work. Guess what. Most people can’t afford them and/or don’t have the expertise to manage them. The median income in this country is $55,000 when if it had continued its trajectory and received its pre 80’s share of productivity increases it would probably be in the 80’s. This income stagnation is not all the fault of Republicans, much of it is simply shifts in the labor market, but they haven’t exactly tried to ameliorate it. And that’s what were basically having to do…ameliorate it. That’s the flaw at the center of the whole supply side worldview. We’ve created an increasingly service based, high tech economy which depends for 70% of its GDP on consumer spending. How the heck are you going to continue growing such an economy while progressively impoverishing 80-90% of the people? Henry Ford had this figured out when he gave his workers high pay so they could buy his cars. The cracks were papered over with debt for about 8 years and the result was disastrous. The bottom line is we have to have some…duh…duh…dud…income redistribution…arghhh. This doesn’t necessarily have to mean higher wages but it could be cash transfers in kind like cheaper healthcare and transportation etc etc. I’m not sure whether its politicians being unable to explain it or the American people being too obtuse to take it in.

70.
Armen | February 16th, 2011 at 7:48 pm

Fuck, dude, that was awesome! I was ten when Reagan got elected, and I remember that I instinctively hated him. You help me verbalize the trauma, Dolan.

71.
Skeeve | February 16th, 2011 at 9:02 pm

Yes indeed, thanks for the history lesson. I grew up in Texas, not California, so the Reagan I knew was the more polished 2.0 version. I had a visceral hatred of the man and never quite understood why. He seemed harmless, even in spite of his administration’s destructive tendencies. A doddering fool at the mercy of his twisted advisors.

Thanks for correcting that impression. He really was fucking creep, and the worst president we’ve had in my lifetime, bar none. Even the Bush creature’s heinous legacy can’t compare to the mess Reagan left behind.

Oh, and to the person above who wrote,

“The wealthy have spent billions of dollars to make us the hateful, nasty people that we are today.”

You said it, brother. Americans today are a product, just like the crap we buy in our stores.

I’m writing this from Costa Rica, where the people are not hateful, vain, Koch-sucking drones. You really have to get out of America and spend some time with real people to see what we’ve become in the years since Reagan slithered onto the national stage. Whenever anyone here asks me what my fellow Americans are like I just say, “Mean and dumb. Don’t go there.”

It’s going to kill me to have to go back to Seattle. Maybe I should try the illegal alien thing…

72.
Homer Erotic | February 17th, 2011 at 4:35 am

@Skeeve: If I can see how viciously mean and dumb we’ve become never, ever having left the territorial USA in my life, I don’t think I could even emotionally endure the thought of returning to the White Aryan Confederate States of Jebus Land having experienced people and cultures which are decent and normal! They’d probably have to drag me onto the plane while I wailed, sobbed, and pleaded like the Reverend Jim Baker back in the 80’s!

73.
Hosswire | February 19th, 2011 at 4:21 pm

Zowee! One of Dr. Dolan’s best, and that says a lot.

74.
Mike Z | March 25th, 2011 at 7:35 am

Undermines faith in humanity, this.

75.
spark | March 25th, 2011 at 9:19 pm

Brilliant.

This needs to be expanded to book length. It would be a companion to “Nixonland”.

76.
Ed | April 17th, 2011 at 2:12 am

John, fantastic article. Like one of your other commenters I’m from the UK and we have a similar situation with Thatcher. She sold off most of the state’s assets, bumped unemployment up to record levels, stamped on unions, cut benefits, tried to destroy the health service, presided over inner-city riots, and generally fucked over anyone who wasn’t rich & living in London. The London-centric press praise her as with Reagan in the US. Outside of the South she’s hated with a passion. Similarly people who support her also have that weird dissonance where everyone but them is a leach on the public funds. Hence this allowed the nut-job aristocrat Cameron to get in and attempt to finish her work. However this time there’s going to be some epic opposition and they won’t get away with it.

77.
E | February 11th, 2012 at 11:46 am

I did not know all this stuff about Reagan.

If i werent for people like you I would not know whats “really” going on.
Before I came to this website i was a straight, white, Republican male.
now Im a fag.
Thank you Exiledonline for exposing all republicans and people like them.

The AEC speaks: You remind the AEC of that HST remark about the insecure guy who spends his time fear-masturbating to forbidden man-on-man action…”thinking that just behind some narrow door in all of his favorite bars, men in red woolen shirts are getting incredible kicks from things he’ll never know.” Relax, you’re among friends, Mr. E.

78.
Bill Rush | July 27th, 2012 at 9:16 pm

I heard that Ronald Reagan gave Richard Nixon a handjob at Bohemian Grove.

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